See Also:
The coming year is fraught with challenges for enterprise developers, but it's also full of opportunities, say top industry analysts -- if you keep your eyes on a few key trends.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 28, 20140 comments
See Also:
Now that the confetti has settled, I thought it would be a good time to talk with industry mavens about what lies ahead in the coming year for developers, both the challenges and the opportunities.
Not surprisingly, many of the industry watchers I spoke to agreed that machine-to-machine learning (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT) offered enormous opportunities for developers to get into the embedded space. "Having the Java people get involved will make it easier for those not familiar with this space," said Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, "but [coding for] real-time systems is a skill and requires some domain expertise. It's not a pure software space, but demand will be huge for the skills."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 21, 20140 comments
Update 3/4/13: We've rescheduled App Dev Trends 2014 to avoid conflicts. The conference will now take place December 8-11, 2014, at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The new date allows us to extend the Call for Papers deadline to April 11. We've had a great response so far, and we're glad to be able to provide more time for speaker proposals, so please keep sending them in! -John
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 8, 20140 comments
Here's a question that vexes analysts and industry watchers: Exactly how many developers are there in the world? Apparently, codederos are a hard bunch to count. Leave it to the indefatigable Al Hilwa to get the job done -- well, Al and his fellow International Data Corporation (IDC) analysts.
IDC recently published its "2014 Worldwide Software Developer and ICT-Skilled Worker Estimates," and I got a peek at the report, which Hilwa authored. It's a country-by-country build-out of population estimates based on the analysis of granular occupation surveys and census data (where available), education enrollment and graduation data (where available), and other materials and correlations where those data were not available. It provides numbers for 90 countries and three world regions, including those you'd expect (U.S., China, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.K., Russia, Canada, etc.) and a few you might not (Nigeria, Qatar, Luxemborg, Jamaica, etc.) Together, these countries account for 97 percentof the world's GDP.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 6, 20140 comments
When IBM announced its decision last month to turn its Watson cognitive computing technology into an open software development platform, complete with APIs and (Big Blue hopes) a partner ecosystem, the news didn't exactly set the world on fire, but maybe it should have.
News of Watson's victory in 2011 over two human contestants on the Jeopardy game show did spark a mainstream media blaze, albeit a brief one, rife with facile quips about IBM's "Frankenstein of trivia," and repeats of übercontestant Ken Jennings' comment: "I, for one, welcome our computer overlords."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on December 17, 20130 comments
Here's a provocative statistic: Within a group of leading companies that includes Microsoft, PayPal, Salesforce, Nokia, Sony Mobile, and Visa, the average ratio of full-time software security specialists to developers is 1.4/100. That's one of the findings in the recently published fifth edition of the software-security "measuring stick" known as the BSIMM (Building Security In Maturity Model).
More
Posted on December 12, 20130 comments
Enterprise interest in Big Data and associated analytics software has sparked intense interest in Apache Hadoop, the open source framework for running applications on large data clusters built on commodity hardware, and something of a flood of tools for developers working with it. But as an applications market emerges in this space, the next Big Thing for Big Data is likely to be app-oriented middleware.
That's an insight Tony Baer, principal analyst at Ovum, shared with me when I talked with him recently about Continuuity's recent Reactor 2.0 release, which the Java toolmaker billed as the first scale-out application server for Apache Hadoop.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on December 4, 20130 comments
The annual Dreamforce conference finally reached street-blocking proportions this year, with a reported 120,000 attendees registering for Salesforce.com's biggest event, winding down this week at San Francisco's Moscone Center. (I remember when it barely took up an auditorium and a hotel hallway.) Attendance-wise, the 2013 edition of the event crushed this year's Oracle OpenWorld, which drew an estimated 60,000 to the same venue in September -- if those numbers are accurate. City officials are dubious, because the conference center can only hold about 60K. And yet, the Salesforce event sprawled beyond Moscone into nearby hotels, including the Palace on Market Street and the Intercontinental at Fifth and Howard. And a bunch of people attended online.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on November 21, 20130 comments
Oracle wants to make it easier for Java developers to leverage the combined power of CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and digital signal processors (DSPs) -- so-called heterogeneous computing -- and the database giant has thrown in with other organizations in an industry consortium to do it.
Oracle was among several industry leaders to announce plans to join the Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation (HSAF) at this year's 2013 AMD Developer Summit. The not-for-profit consortium of system-on-a-chip vendors, OEMs, academics, ISVs and others is developing royalty-free specifications for system architectures that combine different kinds of processors. The foundation's goal is to make it easier to write code for these multi-breed systems, and to grow a heterogeneous compute ecosystem based on an industry standard.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on November 20, 20130 comments